Hosea 2:13-14

Oseo chapter 2 reading verses 13 and 14 And I will visit upon her The days of Balaam wherein she burned incense to them And she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels And she went after her lovers and forgot me Set the Lord Therefore behold I will lure her And bring her into the wilderness and speak comfortably unto her God blessed to us His sacred and holy word this evening The legendary Arab author Lachman Was originally a slave And normally he was treated well by his master But one day his master gave him an extremely bitter melon To eat and he ate it without protesting. His owner said to him afterwards, how could you eat that nauseating fruit? To which Lachman replied, I’ve received many good things from you. Shouldn’t I also be willing to take the bitter from your hand? This response pleased his master so much that he gave him his freedom and he was no longer a slave Josea’s marriage to Gomer is meant to portray God’s relationship to the nation of Israel and Israel like Gomer has turned away from her husband Jehovah in order to pursue her lovers her false gods Now God has been good to Israel but now he’s going to remove all those gifts that he gave them because as he says you forgot me basically you left me out he didn’t pay any attention to me so he’s going to hedge his way with thorns as we saw in our last study he’s going to block her path with a wall but Israel is still using her strength in an attempt to circumvent God’s obstacles and to continue in her central pass She’s ungrateful So God promises tonight in verse 14 to bring her into the wilderness and speak to her. The wilderness is Israel’s bitter melon. It had many good things But now they’re going to have some bitter things And it’s going to be a very bitter time for the nation. It is often through the bitter experiences of life that God really speaks to your soul now that he has your attention and it brings you back to a proper relationship with the Lord. Freedom from sin is not an easy path. Before things become better and sweet between you and Christ, sometimes you have to take into the wilderness. as we see in this text tonight Let me begin by saying that God may punish you by bringing you into the wilderness because of your sin. This is a judgment that is brought upon idolatrous, I should adaltarous, Israel. This text, the word therefore, I think, refers back to verse 13 as I read it here tonight and this is the reason why he takes them to the wilderness. Israel has forgotten the Lord. And this is going to mean suffering for the wilderness into which God is going to bring Israel is the unbearable wilderness of the exile and captivity with regard to Assyria. That Israel would sufferable for such a fate. It did not seem possible under Jeroboam. The second one, everything was going well. They had good prosperity under his reign and power over their enemies and so forth, but soon the nation’s going to get weaker and weaker and Assyria is going to get stronger and stronger. This wilderness must not be thought of than in a literal sense, but in a figured sense. It’s not that they’re going to be out there in the middle of the desert, so to speak, but it’s going to be like they were out there in the middle of the desert. When Israel went into exile, she didn’t live in the literal desert. But what Jose of men here is she is going to become as miserable and as poor in exile as she was before coming to the promised land and having the milk and the honey of the promised land given to her. It’s going to be like. the wilderness journey. I’m going to strip you down to nothing. Once Israel was an impoverished nation, we think about the wilderness in the Sinai desert, and that’s what God says, I’m going to take you back. I’m going to strip you down. I’m not going to enjoy the promised land and all the benefits you’ve had. So once again, she’ll be homeless. This is similar to what we find in verse 3, I will strip her naked and set her as in the day that she was born and make her as a wilderness and set her like a dry land and slay her with thirst. Put your back in the desert. They were always saying, we don’t have anything to eat. We don’t have anything to drink. They were always complaining to Moses about the hardships of the desert life. This is what Israel deserves. Anyone who takes God’s gifts for granted and uses them in a sinful manner as she did with regard to idols here Israel did is due for a wilderness experience, some bitterness experience, some bitterness to be brought into life. It’s a time of pain and misery. God is a jealous God. He doesn’t give his glory to others. And so Israel will want again have to face tough times. The judgment upon adulterous Israel. Now the harshness of your own wilderness. God brings you to a place here of desolation. God has been threatening all along in this chapter was to take away the corn and the wine. Take away the gold and the silver that he had provided for them. The wilderness is a place of hunger and thirst. It’s a place of hardship. When you stray from God, he chastens you in this manner. God may wipe out your bank account and your savings and the pang of hunger may be felt. You may lose your house and your car and your stocks and your bonds and you may find yourself with nothing left. Obviously, some are like Job. they’re made destitute, but not because they were sinful, but for God’s own glory. But some Christians will indeed enjoy the misery of being put out to the wilderness by God, cause of their sin. Lot was a righteous man who nevertheless greatly compromised with the world. You find him not only in that wicked, city of Sodom, but actually an official in the city. Can you imagine that? Maybe they thought, well, this guy’s pretty honest. I guess we could make him an official. I don’t think he was a very honest place. He was very wealthy. He was very prosperous for many years as a citizen of Sodom. And usually when we read the story, most of the attention is focused upon God’s destruction of Sodom, which I think is the main trust there. But you shouldn’t forget about Lot and how God dealt with Lot in this circumstance either. Here is a believer who didn’t want to leave Sodom, even when the angels had come to destroy it, and they had to haul him out. That’s fiery doom was imminent. So what does God do? Does he let him go on to… He was going to give him permission to go to that little city that was just like Sodom. but when he saw the destruction of Sodom, I think he thought, I don’t know if I want to stay here either because these people are just like the Sodomites. And where does he end up? Up in the mountains in a cave with his two daughters. That was his wilderness that God put him in. All was well finished. He got a taste of bitterness because of God’s decision. God brings you to place of desolate. God brings you to place of affliction. Your wilderness may end up being a time of physical ailment where God throws you in the sick bag. Your health fails you. Your body is wracked with pain. Now again, not all sickness is a judgment that comes from God. We know that there are times when affliction comes because of your iniquity. Sometimes God is just teaching you training you into things of the Lord. But the Bible clearly indicates that many of the Corinthian believers were infirm and sickly because of their sin with regard to the Lord’s suffer. You remember. Paul says that they were chastened of the Lord in 1 Corinthians 1132. If you go through the book of Exodus and, well, you go through the law, I think it was in numbers, actually, that the story was recorded. When Miriam’s sister, Moses’ sister, Miriam, spoke against him because he had married an Ethiopian woman. And God struck her with leprosy. And Moses was pleading for her that God would heal her, and he said, hey, if her father had just spit on her, somebody just spit on her, she’d be unclean for so many people. days, you know, so she’s going to have to live with it for a week. And she had to live outside the camp in isolation for a whole week. That was God’s judgment on her, that she spoke against Moses, the meekest men on the face of the earth. Affliction can be a bitter tool of God, as we see here. God brings you a place of loneliness. you know the wilderness is a solitary place you may be a me made to feel the fact that no one cares for your soul God can put you in isolation God can cut you off from friends and family you feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by people God can bring you to a state of depression where there’s no comfort in anything Moses, you recall, tried to free the children of Israel in his own way and his own time. And he murdered a man. And he pursued a course that wasn’t pleasing to God. And eventually, where do you find Moses? He’s on the backside of the Midian desert. Backside of the desert. He’s cut off from his family. cut off from his friends. And though he married there and he had children, you can feel a sense of loneliness. He’s isolated. And for 40 years, he lived in that bitter state. God brings you to a place of loneliness. God brings you to a place of helplessness. Imagine yourself, whisk away and deposit it in a place of loneliness. the Sahara Desert. And you look around you and there’s nothing to be seen that can afford you hope. Everywhere you look, there’s just endless sand in every direction. There are no tracks in the sand. You’re just out there in the middle of the desert. And the burning sun is above you. Like a furnace, it’s radiating and its heat down upon you, making you thirsty. You don’t know which way to time. You don’t know what? to do. At first you may rush on hoping that maybe you’re going to come to the desert’s edge, but no matter which direction you go, it seems endless. I read about a World War II bomber that pick up an exceptionally high tailwind on the way back from a bombing in Italy as they were coming back to Africa would push their plane. a lot further into the desert than they realized. And so the plane ran out of gas before they reached where they were supposed to reach. So when they got out, they were thinking, well, we need to go this way, when actually they needed to go the opposite way. Because they were sped up so much by this huge tailwind man. One man won 126 miles before he collapsed. They all died in the desert. But one guy was, he tried his best to get to the edge of the desert. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. It would be a terrible fate, wouldn’t it? So there you are, and nightfall comes, and you’re in thick darkness, and it’s cold in the desert at night. And this is where you are. Day comes again, and you start all over again. I’m in the middle of nowhere. The sun’s beaten down on me, and I’m my throat is. parched and you’re lost. That’s a terrible place to be here. God’s wilderness can seem like that like that to you. Ask Jonah, as he’s in the stomach of the great fish, with the sea wheat wrapped around him, and he’s floating like a cork in the water of the whale’s stomach. I think that that was his wilderness experience. that he had to have. Now, God often, though, speaks to your heart in the wilderness, as we see from this text as well. There’s a blessing of the wilderness for Israel. If Jose had merely said that God would dump Israel under the wilderness, you wouldn’t be surprised. Well, you deserve it. But he adds something here. Not only is he going to lead Israel into the wilderness, wilderness, but he will lure her there, it says here. What a strange way of putting it. When we think about alluring someone, we’re thinking about something in a loving manner. It’s done. What does God have in mind here? Does he have judgment in mind? Or does he have blessing? Should Israel weep or rejoice by bleeding lead into exile? It gets a little more difficult when we realize the God, God intends to speak to Israel’s heart. I’m going to speak comfortably to her. This skillful bird catcher uses a lure to catch the poor birds. Put some tasty bait on it and captures the birds. Satan allures you into some type of sin using the temptation of pleasure and so forth. We would say that God lures his elect into heaven by the sweet voice of the Holy Spirit working in the life through the gospel of Jesus Christ. But surely we wouldn’t say God lures us into the wilderness. It’s very perplexing. The solution to this strange puzzle is to realize that the wilderness is a blessing for some in the northern kingdom. While it is a very serious punishment for others. And the differences, of course, is the elect, according to the remnant of grace that God has. God has some elect people that will benefit from this. Like the wilderness journey that Israel went through, a lot of carcasses are going to fall in the desert. But there’ll be new people coming up in the nation. God will speak comfort. comfortably to them about trusting in the Lord and we see some people. There’s Esther, there’s Mordecai to come to mind where God is working in their life even though they’re in this exile. This valley of loneliness and adversity can be used and turn to your advantage. Obviously not all the people of Israel will come to their sense in the wilderness of exile. But a holy remnant will be spared. And we shall see that God is hinting here about spiritual Israel, about his true people. So the blessing of the wilderness for Israel, how God’s wilderness brings you to a renewed spiritual state. The wilderness is a place of liberation. God had lured Israel under the wilderness once before when she came out of the bondage of Egypt. It was a celebration that they’ve been freed from their sin. And yet in the endless sand was where Israel was actually formed into a free nation. She’s free from the slavery of her past at that point. But the wilderness is often a place where God deals with your heart, liberate you from sin. You’re isolated from all the great evils that are found in the world, just like the Israelites were isolated from the great evils of Egypt. In other words, it can be a place where God changes, you, mold you. You listen to his law. He promised to obey his voice. 1748, there was a trading ship that departed from an island off the coast of West Africa, headed for England. and it was a slave ship. And aboard was John Newton. Seaman for reputation, for profanity, for ungodly living. Newton afterwards described it in this manner. He said his captain would often tell me, tell him to his grief, they had a Jonah on board, that a current. attended me wherever I went and all the troubles he met with in the voyage were owing to his having taken me into his vessel. The captain may have been right. Newton earlier turned his back upon God. It broke his godly mother’s heart. But at this point, a storm came up. And it, almost destroyed the boat, the ship in which he was traveling. It was too fierce of a storm and it rudely wakened John Newton. Nearly broke apart the ship and the damaged ship drifted for days at sea. And John Newton was on his knees praying. It changed his approach. Prayed for God’s mercy. turned in faith to Jesus Christ. And that’s how a blasphemous, disreputable man became by God’s wilderness, the godly penment of amazing grace. If you like Jonah or a child of God and you stray, you deliberately run away from the Lord, the wilderness may be a liberating experience experience, because because after it works, it brings you to your penance. It’s God’s means of turning you around. The means of you breaking off your sins and returning to him. The wilderness is a place of liberation. The wilderness is a place of uninterrupted communication with God. You know, it’s usual after the wedding ceremony that the husband will whisk his bride away to some isolated place. honeymoon. The point is that the Lord wants to be alone with you for a while. and the wilderness is sometimes the place where you have to go for that to take place. so you’re not distracted by the noise of the world and all the activities that are going on. God intends to remove your attention from your house and your property and your business and your work and your friends and all the glittering tensile of this world and I’m speaking to you. Pay attention to what I have to say. God has you isolated in the wilderness, just like Israel, was all on their own out there in the desert. And he spoke to them. He gave his law to them. Told them how he wanted them to live, what he expected of them and so forth. The soul, all which has forgotten the Lord before is now brought the face to face with God. And sometimes we’re like Elijah. We run from our spiritual duties and we flee into the wilderness and we end up in some cave somewhere all alone. And what happens? God comes to us and speaks to us out of a still small voice. What are you doing here? What are you doing here? You’re now ready to listen to God. God’s word is open to you and you get deliverance and guidance. Sometimes we have to be brought to tears and suffering before we’re going to listen to God’s voice. We have to go through the hard times. But then he speaks comfortably to us. He speaks to our heart. God says, return unto me and I will return unto you. As he says in Malachi 1-37. Repent of your sins. Turn from your evil ways. The wilderness is where, in a sense, God goes eyeball to eyeball with you. It deals with you directly. It’s a place of uninterrupted communication with God. The wilderness is the place of renewed fellowship with God. Originally, the wilderness was the place where God embraced Israel. He drew close to them. It became a festive place. A place where he gave them the feast, and he gave them all the things that were going to be good and beneficial for them. It was a time when they could have sweet fellowship with the Lord. We can become like Gomer at the peak of our misery. And we, and Josea comes in, bales her out, comes and finds her. I wonder if we’re like the prodigal son in a foreign country. God has to bring you to such misery that you’ll look upon your circumstances, come to your senses, and draw, he draws you back to himself. As the prodigal said, you know, it was much better in my father’s house. I’m going to go back to my father. Here in this passage, it was better with my first husband. I don’t go back to my husband. The way I’ve been living is just not gotten me anywhere. Look where it’s landed in the slave market. Let’s profit from that. Realize that when God brings us to this point, It’s time to return. It’s time to go back. It’s time to make things right and return to your Heavenly Father. You know what’s so wonderful about God? Is that when he calls you back, he’s still waiting with open arms to receive you as a backsliver. And you don’t deserve it. You know you don’t deserve it. Return to me. I’ll return to you. The Lord himself said, come unto me. O ye that labored are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. The wilderness is where your fellowship with God can be renewed. The wilderness is where God sometimes tells us he loves us, and we now appreciate it, where it seemed like we didn’t really appreciate it before. So I’ll close tonight with this thought. Yes, the wilderness can be a real place of punishment, and it is for the non-elect, because he doesn’t not have a gracious purpose in it. But for God’s people, the true elect, it’s a place of mercy where God speaks to us comfortably. There’s so many types of wildernesses we could talk about. We’ve touched on some of these things tonight. It’s not easy to see how your wilderness can become a blessing, but I think God is telling us here that it can be. The desert, you know, has the heat and the drought and a thirst and the endless sand. And as a time of affliction, God is telling us that sort of were like Jacob of Old, who laid down on that stone for a pillar at Bethel, and he woke up after that dream and said, I, this is a terrible place. I didn’t know God was here. I didn’t know the Lord was here. But even in the wilderness, the Lord is there. Does he not? It was in the Midian desert that Moses learned that he could do nothing on his own. He had to rely on God in God’s time. It was in the Gilead wilderness where Elijah was renewed as a leader of Israel, sent back to his work. It was in the wilderness of Judea, or Judah, that John the Baptist became a herald for Christ, the Messiah. It was in the wilderness that Jesus won his first great battle with Satan. It’s in the solitude of the wilderness that Paul were told was prepared for the great work of the missionary effort that he was going to put in. God prepared him on the backside of the desert, so to speak. So the wilderness can be a place of blessing, a place of renewal, and so forth. Let’s remember that when we are cast into the wilderness. by God. Let’s close with a word of God.